There's a bit of a story going on between Google, Acer, and Alibaba, a Chinese mobile operating system vendor. Acer wanted to ship a device with Alibaba's operating system, but Google asked them not to, and Acer complied. The reason is that Acer is a member of the Open Handset Alliance, which prohibits the promotion of non-standard Android implementations - exactly what Alibaba is shipping. On top of that, Alibaba's application store hosts pirated Android applications, including ones from Google.

The pirated apps story is only one part. In my eyes the most less important one even.

Google defines certain compatibility criterias. They have a huge set of tests an "Android version" needs to pass and there is the demand that all of the code including modifications and drivers are opened so others can build up on top, reuse, etc. just like with Android itself.

The tests are one reasons we, app-developers, have a limited set of pain coming to us while making our apps proper run on all the Android devices and form-factors out there. I, as app-developer, would have a hard time to realize that someone offers a broken version of my apps for a specific device and claims it works while it doesn't cause of differences I do not find in any other device. User complains to me, blames me, great.

That manufactors are forced to open there Android versions too is great and the reason things like Cyanogen mods for close to all the devices out there are available. Thats why we get 3th party support for our devices where the manufactor itself gave up already and moved on to newer generation devices. Its why we have a huge range of hardware drivers shipped together with Android.